Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

  Ryan was just about to call out a warning that he was approaching the lad, knowing that Jak's razor-honed reflexes might lead to his attacking him before knowing it was a friend, when he heard a gasp and the thudding sound of a body falling and landing hard. There was a faint crackling among the bushes, and then nothing.

  "Jak," he called softly.

  He strained his hearing for a reply, but the night was still. "Jak? You okay?"

  Was that a groan? A low, mumbling kind of a moan from ahead of him?

  "Jak? Where are you?"

  "Down bastard hole, Ryan. Left riverbed. Went past big rock, big as me. Stepped on brush and went in."

  "You hurt?" The boy's voice had seemed tense with pain.

  "It's trap, Ryan. Sharp spike branches in pit here."

  Stepping as if walking on eggshells, Ryan picked his way forward, seeing the large boulder looming ahead of him. He strained his good eye and could make out the dark shape of the pit trap. "Jak. How deep?"

  "Six feet. Mebbe. Broke chest bones, Ryan. Can't stand… can't…" The voice faded away.

  Ryan decided immediately that he needed a light from the fire and as fast as possible. He turned around and stared into the glowing emerald eyes of an enor­mous mutie cougar, which stood less than ten feet away from him.

  Chapter Eight

  TWENTY-FIVE OUNCES of precisely engineered steel; seven and three-quarter inches long; barrel length just under four and a half inches; fifteen rounds of 9 mm ammunition. The P-226 leaped into Ryan's fist be­fore he'd even consciously thought that he'd better draw it from the hip. It fitted there like an extension of his arm.

  In the dim light it wasn't possible to see the exact size of the animal. Its tawny skin seemed to glow faintly. It was around sixteen feet from its jaws, with the glistening saber-teeth, to the squat, bunched mus­cles at the end of its back and had to weigh in at around seven hundred pounds of mean.

  "Back off, bastard," Ryan hissed. Over the years in the Deathlands he'd encountered any number of muties, animals and humans, and some that lay some­where between. A lot of them would respond to the threat of an armed man.

  The mountain lion hunkered down on its haunches, long tail flicking angrily from side to side. Ryan's eye, away from the bright embers of the fire, was becom­ing more accustomed to the darkness of the creekbed. He kept staring at the unblinking green eyes of the huge creature.

  "Get out of here," he said, actually taking a cau­tious half step toward the animal. "Come on. I got an ace on the line with you." The barrel of the SIG-Sauer was steady on the puma's jaws, the best target with the best margin for a close hit if the big cat moved sud­denly in any direction.

  Its mouth opened with an infinite slowness, and Ryan could taste the hunting scent of the big meat eater's breath. Ryan had never seen a carnivore of such a size. Its lethal, curling tusks sprouted from the up­per jaw, twisting and pointing forward and up. If it came for him the pistol wouldn't stop the attack. It might kill the animal but it was too close not to be able to rip out Ryan's belly before it was chilled.

  If it would turn then he could shoot it, knowing it wouldn't then be able to twist and power itself at him. He waved the gun, getting a deep-throated, rumbling growl in return. The tail stopped twitching, and he could see the powerful muscles along its back tensing ready for a spring. Ryan got himself braced to shoot for the head and dive sideways at the same time, hop­ing it wouldn't come to that.

  The mutie cougar erupted toward him.

  The broad trigger was firm and Ryan squeezed it twice, feeling the buck of the gun. The built-in baffle silencer that had been developed during the late 1990s muted the sound of the blaster. It also meant there was virtually no muzzle-flash from the heavy pistol in the blackness.

  Ryan had no way at all of knowing where the bul­lets had hit the animal. He knew with an absolute cer­tainty that he couldn't have missed at such close range.

  The creature's leap brushed against him, even as he dived to his left, rolling, coming up with the gun ready. He'd felt claws actually tangle in his long dark hair, ripping out a chunk by the bloody roots.

  In the darkness, near the brink of the pit, he could dimly make out the thrashing shape of the cougar, hearing its snarling, spitting rage. It crossed his mind that if it fell in the trap on top of the injured Jak Lau­ren, then the boy would surely buy the farm.

  The sailing moon appeared briefly from behind its blanket of cloud, scattering a waxen light over the New Mexico land and showing the fiery sheen of the animal's eyes as it stared intently at Ryan. It was crouched, ready to spring again. Black in the moon­light, Ryan could see blood pouring from a gaping wound in its throat, slightly to the right, toward the shoulder. There was no sign of a second wound.

  It wasn't the time to risk a poor shot. Ryan stead­ied his right wrist with his left hand, extending the P-226 like the finger of the avenging angel, and lev­eled it at the broad, thrusting head of the mountain lion.

  He snapped off five quick shots, spaced one-third of a second apart to allow for any recoil.

  In the moonlight he saw the skull of the puma ex­plode into shards of splintered bone, and brain, blood and tissue erupted in a fine mist. The cougar fought its way to its feet, staggering, destroyed, then the lines went down and it toppled sideways, claws scraping on the bare rock.

  "Fireblast," Ryan said softly. Behind him he could hear the sound of feet running toward him, voices calling his name. To recover from the violent tension, he stayed kneeling, fishing out ammunition from his pants pocket. He reloaded the pistol.

  "Ryan! You okay? Ryan!"

  "I'm here, lover. Watch your step. Jak's gone into a trap and broken some ribs."

  "What was the shooting?" J.B. asked, hard on Krysty's heels.

  "Mutie lion snuck up on me. I chilled it. Could be a pair, so watch the brush."

  "The lion still rules the barranca," Doc said, ob­scure as ever.

  "Where's the pit?" Lori asked.

  "Just ahead, by that big boulder. Fuck it! Moon's going in again. Lori, go get a burning branch. Doc, go with her. We'll need light to get the kid out."

  "Don't call me 'kid,' you old one-eyed bastard."

  The voice, feeble and shaken, came floating up from the hole in the ground. Ryan grinned at the oth­ers. "At least the runt ain't dead."

  Jak was alive, but he was in poor shape. It took the careful efforts of the other five, working as a team, to get him out of the hole. The flames from the make­shift torches showed how close he'd come to a brutal ending.

  The pit was around six feet deep, with sharpened spikes of wood, thick as a baby's arm, set around the bottom. Being skinny and small, Jak had slithered in between the stakes, his chest catching a glancing blow on one of them. As Ryan lifted him out, passing the boy's light body up to J.B., Jak winced and then went suddenly limp. Peeling off the ragged vest, Krysty probed carefully, getting a cry of pain when she touched him on the left side.

  "One, mebbe two broken ribs. Could have some­thing damaged inside. Stomach. Liver. I'm not a doctor." She looked across at Doc Tanner.

  "Nor am I, my dear. Science at Harvard and then philosophy at Oxford, England. Not a jot nor a tittle of medicine."

  "Maybe we should rest him up. Or get him back to the redoubt," Krysty suggested.

  "His face is whitest than white," Lori said, sitting in the dirt by the side of the semiconscious boy, hold­ing his small hand in hers.

  "Got any painies, J.B.?" Ryan asked. "You used to have some."

  "Sure. Back on the war wags. All gone. I haven't seen any since way before Mocsin. Best let him sleep. See how he is in the morning."

  "Sure." Ryan looked around. "After that big mutie cat, I guess we double up. I'll take until two. Krysty, take until four with J.B., and Doc and Lori through until dawn. At any sign of anything… anything, then wake everyone up. And keep an eye on Jak."

  But the boy slept fitfully through the night, until Lori gently shook Ryan awake.

 
; "First light," she whispered.

  Ryan stretched. Sleeping out in the open, without even a horse blanket for cover, was second nature to him. And to the others. You got used to it—used to waking stiff, muscles cramping, often with your clothes sodden from overnight dew.

  And always cold.

  The sand beneath him was still dry, but the boul­ders and the trunks of the cottonwoods glistened with water. The sun was barely over the eastern rim of the hills, showing pink, with a halo spread around it like a great circular rainbow.

  "How's Jak?"

  "Just awaked," she said.

  "How are his bones?"

  Krysty shook her head, the long scarlet locks tum­bling about her shoulders, their color heightened by the rising sun.

  "Not so good."

  "Fevered?"

  "Yeah. Being he's albino, you can't tell if he's flushed or not. But his skin's dry as sand and he feels like he's burning up. Says his chest hurts. You can hear him draw breath."

  Ryan stood, tightening the laces on his combat boots, rubbing at the thickening stubble on his chin. "What kind of noise?" he asked.

  "Hear for yourself, lover. Come on."

  Doc was pushing a couple of self-heats in among the smoldering embers of their fire, trying to get them beyond tepid warmth. Lori stood, shoulders hunched, peering into the mist that lay in the hollows of the land way off to the north, shrouding the peaks of the rounded mesas.

  J.B. squatted beside Jak. The boy's face was as white as ever, but his red eyes caught Ryan's ap­proach and he tried to sit up. The Armorer gently pushed him back down again, glancing up at Ryan.

  "Kid's not so good," he said.

  "Don't call…" Jak began not even managing to finish the sentence. He lay down, eyes closing. Ryan noticed that the young lad's fingers were twisting and knotting on his chest, as if they were possessed of a life of their own.

  He knelt down, feeling the coolness of the earth on his hands. Doc was muttering angrily, and Ryan called him to be quiet. "I'm trying to listen to Jak's breath­ing," he said.

  "My apologies. But these confabulated, sockdologizing tins refuse to warm up. I swear they are doing it to perversely annoy me. But I shall be quiet, Ryan, of course I shall. I thought that his respiration was less than healthy."

  Ryan thought it sounded a whole lot less than healthy.

  The movements of the chest were shallow and rapid, and sounded like a failing engine. As the sunlight grew stronger Ryan noticed to his alarm that Jak's natural pallor was becoming tinged with a pastel blue around the lips and below the fluttering eyes.

  And even as he watched, the breathing was becom­ing slower

  Chapter Nine

  "HE'S DYING."

  "No. No, Ryan."

  "Lori, I'm real sorry about this, but you can look at him. There's some kind of damage to his guts."

  "Help him."

  Doc took her arm. "I fear that what our leader says is all too true, my dearest child. No doubt a reputable surgeon could pluck the boy from the jaws of Hades. None of us possesses sufficient skill in the arts of medicine."

  "We can all save he. All of us." Lori was almost in tears.

  "I fear not," Doc said.

  "What if we got him back to the gateway?" Krysty suggested.

  "Broken ribs," J.B. said. "And something worse broke inside him. There's drugs and all that but we don't…"

  "When we rode the war wags with Trader there was a medic around. Kathy on War Wag One. Me and… we just don't have that kind of skill at saving lives."

  "Just killing," Krysty said bitterly, turning away from Ryan and walking through the grove of shim­mering cottonwoods, toward the dried riverbed.

  He followed her, catching up near the tangled deadfall. She turned around and held up a hand. "I know, lover. I shouldn't have said it. I know that. But to see a boy of fourteen dying in front of us… It's not right, Ryan."

  "Nobody ever said it had to be right, Krysty. You know that."

  "Sure. Doesn't mean I have to like it, though. So, what do we do?"

  "Rig a travois. Use branches from the cottonwoods. We'll haul Jak down to the trail. Looked well-traveled. We wait and hope someone comes along. Someone who can help him."

  "If nobody comes?"

  "I guess he'll be dead by sunset."

  It didn't take long to build a crude stretcher that two of them could drag along, its ends bouncing over the rough ground. Doc said that he'd seen things like it when he'd visited with the Apaches as a young man. But then they'd used ponies to pull the travois.

  "Sure wish we'd got us a horse, Doc," J.B. said. "Or even a half dozen of 'em."

  Jak had become feverish, throwing his head from side to side, the long white hair tangling, already stained with orange dust. Ryan tied him to the travois to prevent him rolling off. As he secured a length of cord around the boy's chest, Jak's eyes snapped open.

  "Watch gators, Pa!" he called, his voice cracked and frail.

  "Stay easy, Jak," Ryan said quietly, not sure if his words penetrated the burning maze of the boy's brain.

  The ruby eyes came back from some limitless dis­tance, focusing briefly on Ryan's face.

  "If don't make it… been good. All you. Good." Then the fire swept in and his head slumped. His eyes closed and he was still.

  "Has he gone?" Krysty asked, at Ryan's shoulder. "He looks…"

  "No. Still breathing, but it's shallow and real fast. He's baking up."

  IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER ten o'clock in the morning when they finally reached the trail and laid the travois in the shade of a giant saguaro. There was a low butte a half mile to the north, commanding a view all across the wide valley.

  "I'm going up there for a recce," said Ryan, "see if there's any sign of life. Keep watch down here. I'll be back in a half hour."

  Bushes of milky locoweed dotted the desert, scat­tered in clumps among the cactus. Ryan walked briskly away from his friends, boots crunching through the soft sand. A scorpion scuttled from the heavy ap­proach of the man, tail curved menacingly over its back.

  In his heart, Ryan felt that Jak was almost cer­tainly doomed. Sure, miracles happened.

  But they didn't happen very often.

  It was difficult to tell with the albino, but Ryan sus­pected that the boy was hemorrhaging from some in­ternal injury. In the heat of New Mexico, even in the shadows, he would be burning up. They'd given him all the water they could spare during the morning, but it was just impossible to get his temperature down near normal.

  He eased the G-12 across his shoulders. The ground was already rising ahead of him as he reached the bottom of the butte. Though he hadn't mentioned his fears to the rest of the group, Ryan was only too aware that the owners of the horses that had pitted the trail might not be too friendly.

  Like so many elements of life in the Deathlands, you could only cross the bridge when you came right up to it.

  Ryan ran his fingers through his hair, wincing at the amount of grit that matted it. Sweat was trickling down inside the patch over his left eye and he eased it away, tentatively rubbing at the puckered socket. The salt in perspiration always made his eye sore.

  As far as he could see in any direction, there didn't seem to be any sign of life. There wasn't even a bird circling in the delicate blue of the sky. He thought he could hear, very faintly, the distant rumble of thun­der, as some chem storm boiled up.

  His wrist chron showed it was just short of eleven o'clock. He decided to rest there for a few minutes, maybe wait until noon. Then he would rejoin the oth­ers, and they could wait together for death to claim the fourteen-year-old boy.

  The numbers crept around toward twelve, and he waited along.

  He heard a sharp buzzing and flapped his hand at a sleek, striped bee that was hovering near the back of his neck. Ryan had heard tales from the south of the Deathlands of swarms of fierce killer bees that would attack cattle and people, and sting them to death. He stood, brushing dirt from his pants, and looked around
to see if the bee was the harbinger of a deadly swarm.

  But the sky was clear and untouched. It was very close to midday and he sighed. Things didn't look good for Jak.

  The sun hung directly overhead, reducing his shadow to a tiny circle of sharp darkness that pud­dled his boots. The temperature felt like it was way over a hundred. It looked like nobody was going to travel the trail that day. Ryan took a last look around. He hesitated, shading his eye with his hand. Over to the northwest, just visible behind a crooked-backed mesa, he could see a small pillar of swirling orange and gray dust.

  It was moving steadily to the spot where the others were resting. Ryan watched it for a few seconds longer, making sure that it wasn't one of the natural dust devils, whipped up by the erratic wind. But it contin­ued unabated. He turned and began to jog slowly down the face of the butte, to rejoin the others.

  "They're about five miles off. Couldn't see any other trail, so they have to pass this way."

  "We wait here?" J.B. asked, glancing doubtfully around them. "Not much good for defense."

  Ryan sucked in hot air between his front teeth, whistled it out again. "Guess you're right. If we move back there—" he pointed to a slope of gently rising land, under the ridge of one of the infinite number of mesas "—we can find some cover."

  "Will that not leave our rear a trifle exposed?" Doc said.

  Ryan nodded. "Yeah, but that trail's ahead of us. If they try to circle, then we can see them good and clear—as long as we don't get anyone else coming up behind us."

  Working together like the team they'd become, the five friends managed to haul the travois across the dried-up bed of the creek, wrestling it up the farther slope, onto flatter ground. They eventually found a level place behind a ridge of frost-broken boulders beneath the mesa.

  Lori stayed with the delirious boy while the other four found good places to defend among the rocks. The trail came within a hundred paces or so of where they waited.

  The dust cloud was larger, unmistakable, and Ryan called to Krysty to see if her keen sight could make out any more.